Can you really get a Windows PC running like new again? Using this free tool from Microsoft, you can get pretty close.
Some of these are made by Microsoft itself. There's Microsoft PowerToys, for example, which lets you tweak everything from keyboard shortcuts to the layout of your desktop. There's also Microsoft Journal, a journaling app designed primarily to be used with a stylus on Surface computers.
Here though we're focusing on Microsoft PC Manager, which first appeared in beta form in 2022, and is now available for free to anyone who wants to give it a try. Microsoft promises it “effortlessly enhances PC performance with just one click,” and will “keep your PC running smoothly.” In other words, it's intended to clean up some of the clutter and baggage that your PC may have accumulated over the years—perhaps even giving it that “good as new” feeling you get when you boot a Windows computer for the first time. The Microsoft PC Manager Interface Once you've downloaded and installed the software, the first thing you'll see will be a pop-up in the lower right corner of the screen. This gives you an overview of the current state of your system, including how much of your RAM is in use, how many apps and processes are currently running, and how many temporary files are taking up room on your hard drive. You can see plenty of information from this pop-up, but many of the utilities and scans included with Microsoft PC Manager will launch a separate window. To begin with, you can head to Settings to make sure the software is configured as you'd like. You can have the app automatically launch with Windows, and automatically intervene by freeing up RAM or clearing out temporary files. Something that may give some users pause is that you don't get an awful lot of information about what the program is doing behind the scenes in terms of optimizing and deleting. Presumably if these actions are so beneficial to your system, Windows would do them anyway, without recourse to an additional utility. Still, there is the reassurance that this is an official Microsoft tool, so it should know what it's doing. There is some overlap with the rest of Windows. Via the Toolbox panel, for instance, you can take screenshots, launch the Notepad and Calculator utilities, and open up links in Microsoft Edge. You don't really need Microsoft PC Manager to do all this, but the shortcuts are here anyway. There's also a Show toolbar on the desktop toggle switch on this screen, which puts a persistent dashboard on your desktop with key system information. Under Protection and Apps you get some more overlap with the main Windows Settings panel. From both Microsoft PC Manager and Windows Settings you're able to run virus scans, check default app settings, manage Windows updates, see the apps and processes that are currently running on your system, check programs launching at the same time as Windows, and open the Microsoft Store. One feature I do like under Apps is the Deep uninstall option. The standard Windows uninstall routine only fully removes applications and all their associated files if the developers have coded the uninstall routines properly—here, Microsoft PC Manager makes sure there's nothing left of a program you want removed from your system. Digging Deeper When you're ready to start taking some action inside Microsoft PC Manager, the Health check on the Home screen is a good starting point. This looks at everything from the strength of your Wi-Fi connection to the number of duplicate files you've got on disk—basically an overview of everything Microsoft PC Manager can help out with. Some of the recommendations are a little suspect—one that I saw was to make Microsoft PC Manager auto-start with Windows, when I'd already chosen not to—but the tool gives some genuinely useful advice, including an appraisal of which background processes are using up the most system resources. The app even dives into the traces of activity left on your system, whether it's logs of Windows activity or the web history left behind by your browser. Some extra information would be helpful here: Clearing your browser cache can clear up a lot of hard drive space, for example, but it will mean every website will have to be fully loaded again, which can slow down your browsing. The Disk analysis option under Storage is perhaps the second most useful screen in Microsoft PC Manager, helping you to identify files you can safely get rid of: Duplicates, temporary files, downloads, and so on. You can also filter through the largest files on your system and see which of them can be safely deleted. In each case you get a detailed breakdown of what's been found, and you're in charge of what gets wiped. My own experience with Microsoft PC Manager, tested on a reasonably healthy Windows computer, was a little mixed. Some of the recommendations were useful and welcome, while others were a bit baffling—and there was more overlap with features already in Windows than I expected. Of course, everyone is going to come to this utility with a different level of know-how and technical confidence when it comes to Windows. Overall, it's definitely more useful than not, and it's something I'll be keeping around. I wouldn't be confident having it carry out any kind of boosts or clean-ups automatically though, and I'll be keeping the manual reviews in place for now. It also begs the question for some features—like the deep uninstall—why is this separate from Windows?
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